Rowan Curran says, “Years ago, I worked at a large customer service vendor. Our CEO had tasked us to “eat our own dog food” – that is implement our own solutions for our customer service operations which comprised of 40 or so tier 1 and 2 customer service agents. With these marching orders, I put a group of consultants and business analysts together to get this done. And after several months, the project stalled; got restarted; stalled again; then finally died. We limped on with our old systems in place for many more years.

Why did this project fail? It was because of a mismatch between the complexities of the solution that we were trying to implement, and the company’s business needs. The customer service company that I worked for made enterprise software solutions, suitable for large organizations, which was typically implemented in call centers of many hundreds, if not thousands of call center agents. These solutions offered robust case management, with very customizable workflows, queuing and routing rules. These solutions also offered complex knowledge management, email and chat engines that could support millions of interactions a month. Implementation tended to span many months, where professional services consultants dove into the business processes that agents followed, and then reproduced them in these enterprise solutions”.

For Customer Service Solutions, Bigger Is Not Always Better

Forrester

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